Most of the Music Academy of the West’s piano faculty and one stellar visiting artist — the justly revered Ursula Oppens — will be assembled on the stage of Hahn Hall at 8 p.m. Tuesday for what even we jaded South Coast music lovers must consider an extra special “Tuesdays at Eight,” one devoted entirely to nonsolo keyboard works.
The program for the evening includes Bedřich Smetana’s Sonata Movement E-Minor for 2 Pianos, 8 Hands, 1849 (John Churchwell, Jonathan Kelly, Natasha Kislenko, Margaret MacDonald); François Poulenc’s Sonata for 2 Pianos, FP 156, 1953 (Natasha Kislenko and Margaret MacDonald); and Olivier Messiaen’s astonishing tour-de-force, Visions de L’Amen/Visions of Amen, 1943 (Jerome Lowenthal and Oppens).
Smetana (1824-84) is much better known to us for his operas, his orchestral poems and even his chamber music than he is for his piano pieces, though he was himself an accomplished pianist. He must have had a lot of friends who were pianists, too, for this sonata movement, written when he was 25, manages to stuff four of them into its 11 minutes.
Poulenc, too, was a fine pianist, but he wrote this sonata, not for himself and Jacques Fevrier — his usual collaborator — but for the celebrated American piano duo of Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, who had been such effective champions of his two-piano concerto, especially in the United States.
Two themes play an outsized role in the music of Messiaen: his devout, rather austere Roman Catholicism, and his fanatical, endearing love of birds. Both these themes are at play in the Visions of Amen — for Messiaen, if heaven’s skies were not full of birds and if the air of paradise did not ring with birdsong, he would almost rather not go there.
Lowenthal has no need to prove his modernist credentials — as a Juilliard professor, he has been in the flow of every modernist current for the past half-century — so it is all the more noble and fine that he should tackle this immense work at this stage in his career, before an easygoing California crowd. If anyone can bind this sprawling masterpiece together and make a single searing “vision” of it, it is he and the brilliant Oppens.
“Why should the aged eagle spread his wings?” T.S. Eliot asks. “What else should he do with them?” Lowenthal might reply.
Tickets to the concert are $37 and can be purchased at the door, by calling 805.969.8787 or by clicking here.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com.